Awakening
by Rose6
Summary: Miss Parker's dreams are telling her all she needs to know


Title: Awakening Author: Rose; rosenfairy@hotmail.com Summary: Parker finally awakens to the meaning of a dream. Disclaimer: I'd love to say they are mine, but then my psychiatrist actively discourages me from indulging in my habit of compulsive lying. So we'll say they belong to TNT and blah blah, I'd say they deserve to own them and have treated them well, but then remember I am not allowed to lie. Authors Note: Um, nothing much to say, but great challenge Eve, thanks for that. Ooooh and thanks Mel for reminding me that I haven't written in a while, I'd been unconsciously forgetting and hoping I wouldn't notice.  
  
  
  
Response to: Challenge #213 - Posted on 10/24/2002  
  
Eve's Room Situation Challenge  
  
Take the following paragraph and write a story around it.  
  
"We are the only color in the room. The only things alive. The air is acrid and thick with heat; filled with wet sounds and hot sounds and the sounds of dying things. The sounds of ruin. At this point, I don't know if I'm holding ...... up or it's him that's supporting me. I think it must be the latter, as he's as stiff."  
  
(Situation taken from the beginning of an X.-Files story by M. Etheridge)  
  
Here again ... all ratings, pairings and categories. If you write a reply to it be sure to send a copy to miss.parker@gmx.at to keep the Challenges Archive updated with your amazing replies.  
  
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"We are the only color in the room. The only things alive. The air is acrid and thick with heat; filled with wet sounds and hot sounds and the sounds of dying things. The sounds of ruin. At this point, I don't know if I'm holding Jarod up or it's him that's supporting me. I think it must be the latter, as he's as stiff.."  
  
It was at that moment I woke, always that moment, and always that dream. The two of us, always the two of us, and always trapped in a place so amazingly similar to every person's view of what exactly hell would be like. So suffocating, so intense, filled with an air that resonates power, and carries an underlying current of domination and suppression. I can never tell if we are simply the only things alive, or the only things in the place with spirit and soul, the air is acrid, powerful and oppressing, it has stolen the will and power of every other spirit or being in the place and only the two of us still hold any semblance of life. And yet as the dream progresses we lean more on each other, refusing to sway, refusing to align with the evil presence surrounding us and yet being drawn to it and restricted by it. Evermore we lean in, lean on each other, each taking our turn to hold and carry the other, each providing the other with the will to go on, with the means to do so, holding the smallest things out as breadcrumbs, as goals to attain simply to promote the concept of life. It is then I wake, always then, always as the dependence grows, always as the spirit is weakened from each of us individually but strengthened by our joining together to live. And then I lie awake and I wait, because it is always then that he will call, always then that he will attempt to lead me astray, to make me ponder myself and my family in his desperate attempts to lead me away from him and his similar search. It is always at the exact moment the dream is finally reaching a conclusion and I am only moments from discovering what it is my mind is actually telling me that he calls, and tonight is no exception.  
  
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Parker picked up the phone on the first ring, her mind already pondering exactly what little snippet wonder boy would feel the need to impart tonight.  
  
"What"  
  
"Do you ever wonder why we can't move on Parker?"  
  
"If I say no will you hang up?"  
  
"No"  
  
"And if I say yes?"  
  
"Well here's my question,."  
  
"I'm all ears"  
  
"I watched a movie today"  
  
"That's not a question"  
  
"Tarzan... After I got past the question of why a man would swing from tree vines in a loin cloth, I have to wonder about Jane... she has everything you or I would want, a loving family, stability.. everything.. and then she leaves it all for a man in a loin cloth, swinging from a vine and chatting with monkeys, why?"  
  
"Sometimes the life we lead is not the one we want, Jarod, you of all people should know that. I guess the decision of whether or not to leave what you have and gain what you want comes down to whether or not you have the guts to betray what you know and take the chance at something better, not many people have the guts to do that. Hell, I know you and me don't. Or maybe it just comes down to who owns you, if your life is not yours the choice to change it is not yours to make."  
  
"Maybe it just comes down to how much you have to risk, risking happiness seems easier than risking than our lives, or losing chances, if I leave a find a new life with new people I run the risk of never finding my family."  
  
And with that comment for once Miss Parker ended the call, sparing a quick thought as she did to wonder exactly when it had been that she had begun to play Sydney's role and actually joined with Jarod in pleasant searching conversation. He was right, her life was not what she wanted, not what she needed, not anything like the dreams she had once held while sitting in the corner with an equally imaginative little boy and talking about all they could be and all they would have, both individually and together, there was always a together. They were both right though, she didn't have a choice to make, her life was not hers and the choice was not hers to make. At that thought she had to wonder what the purpose of the call was, had it been to mock her, to point this out to her and drive her will so low she would find it even more difficult to rise from her bed and chase his sorry ass across the country, or had it been to find a party who could commiserate, who could not only understand his pain but share it, carry it equally and share the load, for it is one thing to hurt, but another to hurt alone.  
  
And that was when it hit her, the meaning of the dream, the one thing her unconscious felt it necessary for her to know, to feel, to understand and act on. The atmosphere in her dream was the centre, a figure so powerful and prominent in her life it was able to surround and define her; it was able to leech from her spirit in a desperate bid to have her join its shapeless spiritless members in a place beyond remorse, beyond compassion and outside the realm of pain and feeling. And yet as they struggled to do that, she had this ever present and ever powerful force leaving her presents, calling her nightly and sending her clues, allowing her to both see the truth and fight it through insight, while also providing an unwavering shoulder to lean on. In return she acknowledged that she would often let him run, find his hideout a minute to late, shoot past him rather than at him, would offer him comfort, albeit disguised for the benefit of those listening, always listening, she provided a voice to talk to, an ear to cry to and partner in a world of desolation. That was the meaning of the dream, it was her unconscious, probably at the influence of her mama, telling her that she was not alone; that it is was only through him that strength was attainable, that power was reachable and that an end could finally be achieved. He was the strength that held her upright and kept their hands off her will to survive, as she was his, and only together could they finally reach the end. Finally make it to the bright land beyond, to the place where the air was fresh, where sunlight was not eaten by oppression and the atmosphere was light, a place they had both experienced for a small period as children, and a place that only through their joining could they ever find the strength to reach again.  
  
At that Parker rose from her bed, dressed quickly in a pair of tight low rise jeans and a fitted shirt from the back of her closet, clothes never worn before and therefore least likely to hold any form of tracking device, and then grabbing a few small hidden items of her mothers and leaving her phone and all other possible tracking devices on her bedside table she left the house, stopping only once to look back on the house that had held her hostage to her mother's memory and her father's power since she was a child. She would return one day, but it would be after her and Jarod had managed to close down the centre, after they had rid the world of its doom and oppression and removed the risk of others wandering into its never ending darkness. Closing the door behind her she headed towards her car, and took off for the nearest 24 hour rental service to swap it for another less obvious and less traceable vehicle. And then, then she was off to see Jarod, off to tell him of her dream, of the way it had slowly enlightened her to the world around her and made her finally make a move and change her life. Hopefully they would finally find what fate had dangled before them in front of Ocee's fire, hopefully they would finally find in each other the courage to end the darkness and move into a brighter world. A world where leaning on each other was not necessary for survival, was not something they did to save themselves, instead something they did solely because it was what they wanted from life. And in that moment her mind opened, the door to a hidden talent was finally revealed to her, a door which held the one secret she had spent the last five years searching for but could access only when she wanted it for herself and not for them. It was a door that held the knowledge of Jarod's location, not in the form of an address, or a name, but through two pools of warm brown light, two shining beacons that would lead her to his very doorstep where she would hopefully be met by the same pools of light as they shone from within the eyes of the man who would take her in his arms and finally find the strength to do what they all knew and feared he had the power to do, bring an end to the blight that was the centre.  
  
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End file.
